Microscope Gallery is very pleased to present Exquisite Fucking Boredom, Polaroid images byartist/writer Emma Bee Bernstein (1985-2008). With intimate as well as often stagedphotographs of the artist and her close friends, Bernstein – who committed suicide in Venice,Italy at the age of 23 – transforms the spontaneous, on-the-spot Polaroid aesthetic into agenerational portrait of hyper-self-conscious, passionately alluring young women and men takingon adulthood with deadly serious abandon. The more than 200 photographs in Exquisite FuckingBoredom were taken during Bernstein’s college years, 2003 to 2007 and have never before beenseen. The photographs have been assembled from Bernstein’s personal archive and private diarynotebooks, which will also be on view.

Bernstein who earned a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from the University of Chicago writes,“The perfect projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only does so for the duration ofthe photographic performance.” Bernstein is indebted to the photography of RobertMapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Francesca Woodman, and CindySherman. Her works are marked by an acute awareness of the fleeting and temporary nature ofexistence. The Polaroid series are just one of several bodies of photographic works by the artistwho also worked with 35mm film and digital formats.

"... [Bernstein's work] is consistent in tone, with an atmosphere of tension, verging ondiscomfort though interlaced with humor, and a guardedness that never relaxes.”-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times

Bernstein’s short film Exquisite Fucking Boredom (2006) also will be shown during the course ofthe exhibit. And, film-maker Henry Hills will premiere on June 18 a new 80-minute versionof Emma’s Dilemma, a film that documents Bernstein’s adolescent years (1997-2002), andfeatures her conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Jackson Mac Low, Ken Jacobs, RichardForeman, Keith Sanborn, Lee Ann Brown, Susan Howe, Kenneth Goldsmith, and others.

EMMA BEE BERNSTEIN’s works have been previously exhibited in solo shows at the University ofChicago and Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in New York. Her work has also exhibited at A.I.R.Gallery, NYC, the Smart Museum, Chicago, and at the University of Nevada, Reno. Herbook GirlDrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism, co-authored with Nona WillisAronowitz, was published by Seal Press in 2009. Belladonna #4, which features her writing andphotographs, was published in 2009.

MICROSCOPE GALLERY presents the works of film, video, sound, new media and performanceartists from the emerging to pioneers of their art forms. The gallery is located in BushwickBrooklyn and opened in September of 2010.

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions." – Jerome Rothenberg on The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein.

"A superb poet and great inventor of poetry, Charles Bernstein dazzlingly invents the essay for poetry: professing in a gorilla suit and white tuxedo.”—George Lakoff

Robert Creeley: "Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material." ––"Help Is on the Way" in The American Book Review (Vol.14, No. 6, 1993), p. 18.